The irrepressible Hawkwind release their 36th studio album – Stories From Time and Space – a year or so following The Future Never Waits.
Now in their sixth decade and as active as ever with Dave Brock the ever present driving force, Hawkwind roll on and on. Dave’s in his early eighties now so we have to wonder how long we’ll have the legendary space rockers around for.
Stories From Time and Space comes in with thirteen tracks and a running time a few seconds short of an hour. Seven songs with lyrics and six instrumentals.
The opener – Our Lives can’t Last Forever is an unusual one for Hawkwind. A piano driven ballad type affair with some background synth washes and meandering guitar. A slightly moody vocal making it a chilled out feel though not bad.
The next three songs – The Starship, What Are We Going to Do While We’re Here and The Tracker a gives us classic Hawkwind at their best.
The Starship has a constant, repetitive, hypnotic bass riff, synth swirls and noises, tasty guitar chugging and wandering around, nice synth solo and interplay.
What Are We Going to Do….long trippy intro, the saxophone comes in adding to the atmosphere before it takes off in to more typical chugging guitar, swirling synths and a moody saxophone break towards the end. More “proper” Hawkwind. The Tracker is also classic Hawkwind on familiar territory doing what they do best.
What Are We Going to Do…..I think is the best track on the album. Check it out:
Then we go in to the first sign of filler. A short instrumental of synth noise which seems pointless.
Eternal Light is a song of two halves. The first half is rather slow though livens up considerably half way with some tasteful guitar over the spacey synths and beat.
More padding follows with two instrumentals. One a repetitive acoustic thing and the other I suppose could be called ambient though it has nothing to it.
Back to the good stuff with Traveller of Time and Space. Well, for a while until the lyrics finish after which we have around five minutes of drawn out meandering noises which sound to me like they were made up as they went along.
Yet more padding next with two more noodling instrumentals before Frozen in Time comes in as a nice spacey atmospheric with a sensitive vocal. A short song, but good.
Another instrumental – Stargazers – brings the album to a close. At least this one does have a bit of ooomph to it.
For me – Stories From Time and Space is a middling Hawkwind album. When it’s good, it’s good with a feel of say the Levitation, Choose Your Masques and Sonic Attack albums.
When it’s bad, it’s bad with the instrumental padding. None of them come anywhere near Wind of Change, The Aubergine That Ate Rangoon or The Forge of Vulcan for example.
Whilst many of the comforting familiar Hawkwind trademark sounds are present, the padding and filler in the instrumentals does (in my opinion) make the hour long running time a bit of a stretch.
Dropping some or all of the instrumentals to give a more succinct running time of day forty minutes I think would have been a good move.
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